RAIN

Walking through a monsoon downpour is like swimming in your clothes. You know that clingy feeling, the kind where your clothes are suctioned to your body and your shoes are squishy? Walking down the street in a monsoon downpour is like trying to fjord a river while avoiding two lanes of traffic. And just because there are these torrential amounts of rain in a matter of minutes does not mean that the bus right behind you is planning to slow down in the least. So you are faced with the choice to either jump into a puddle on the side of the road or be covered by that puddle on the side of the road. That is if you can call them lanes. Yet this is just an everyday kind of thing. No one seems to notice that their bags are now drenched, their shoes muddied, their appearance that of a “drowned rat.” It doesn’t really matter where you are going. You just trudge right ahead and there you are.

Taken by complete surprise, the most sensible thing to do in this instance is to look at the person closest to you on the street, throw up your hands and laugh. If you are lucky, you are walking alongside schoolgirls on their way home for lunch and together, you can revel in this moment - the instant where God's precious gift of water, the sustainer, is racing to the earth. You can jump across puddles and sometimes, if you are quite fortunate, land in one. And you feel new and refreshed. It’s a situation that could easily frustrate the best of us and make us want to pull our hair and scream! Why am I so wet? My clothes are ruined! I’ll never make it on time! The rains have great potential to dampen, literally, our spirits. But it is in these sudden and unexpected downfalls when we see the grace in God and the grace in others and we learn to treasure such precious gifts.